Serial Killings

On January 17, 1989, a 26-year-old unemployed welder in Stockton,
California, named Patrick Purdy drove his Chevrolet station wagon to
Cleveland Elementary School, which he had attended two decades before.
Stepping from the car, Purdy wore a flak jacket under a camouflage
shirt and carried a Chinese-made semiautomatic AK-47 rifle. He walked
through an unlocked gate to the school's playground and, after placing
plugs in his ears, raised the gun and squeezed off 105 rounds into the
roughly 300 children at play there. Within minutes, five children-all
Asian Americans-lay dead, and 29 others were wounded, including a
teacher. His mission accomplished, Purdy put a 9-mm pistol to his head
and pulled the trigger.

At the time, many people wrote the shooting off as an isolated
event, a rampage by a lunatic. Born into a broken home, Purdy was an
alcoholic, a drug dealer, and a male prostitute before his 18th
birthday. Investigators described him almost as evil incarnate; his was
an act of "festering hatred," they said, an attempt to lash out at
minorities, whom he blamed for his joblessness.

But a decade later, the carnage in Stockton has been repeated
several times in towns whose names are now shorthand for school
violence: Springfield, Jonesboro, Paducah, Pearl, Bethel, Moses Lake,
and, last spring, Littleton. Though the shooters in recent years have
been freckle-faced teenagers who lacked Purdy's history of mental
illness, they seemed to draw from the same well of twisted emotions.
They were all outcasts seeking revenge for perceived slights and
injustices. Some were racists.

Together, these miscreants have fueled the perception that schools
are black-board jungles. Magazines, newspapers, and TV news programs
have proclaimed each shooting an unspeakable act of brutality-and then
talked about it endlessly in painstaking and melodramatic detail. "When
Killers Come To Class" declared a 1993 U.S. News and World
Report headline. "No one is immune," warns James Garbarino in his
new book Lost Boys.

Thanks to the cold-blooded violence and white-hot hype, school
violence emerged as one of the dominant education issues of the '90s.
Each shooting was followed by its own cycle of shock, debate, and
policy prescription. According to gun-control advocates, reaction to
the Stockton shooting crippled the National Rifle Association in
California and paved the way for legislation nationwide. Only a few
months after Purdy stepped onto the Cleveland playground, the
California legislature cleared an assault-weapons ban that had been
stalled for years. A year later, Congress passed the Gun-Free School
Zones Act, which set a maximum punishment of five years in prison for
anyone caught with a firearm within 1,000 feet of a school. "People
responded to the ferocity of the act," says Luis Tolley, western
director of Handgun Control Inc. "Thirty-four kids-little kids-were
shot by one man with just one gun in the space of a few seconds."

Solutions proffered after subsequent shootings ranged from the
practical to the absurd. In 1994, one year after Scott Pennington, a
high school senior in Grayson, Kentucky, shot and killed a teacher and
a custodian, federal lawmakers mandated that schools expel any child
who brought a gun to school. After Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
terrorized Columbine High this year, officials of a Michigan gun-rights
group offered free training for teachers, arguing that armed educators
might have stopped the bloodshed.

Educators, meanwhile, have beefed up security in response to the
tragedies and the public's fears. Some schools have taken simple steps,
such as requiring identification badges for visitors; others have
turned to Big Brother tactics, hiring more guards and installing metal
detectors and hidden surveillance cameras. Launching an American
Federation of Teachers' initiative in 1995 to make schools safe and
orderly, Albert Shanker, the late president of the union, declared, "We
view this as a central, life-or-death campaign for public schools."

These precautions have probably made schools safer at the end of the
decade than they were in the beginning. Recent federal figures suggest
school violence is down. But some of the most seemingly sensible
safeguards against violence haven't always worked as planned. When
15-year-old Kip Kinkel brought a gun to his Springfield, Oregon, school
in 1998, administrators sent him home, as required by the 1994,
post-Pennington law. But Kip returned the next day with a rifle, a
handgun, and a Glock pistol and shot 24 classmates, two fatally. "Kids
who bring guns to school represent a threat," says Alfred Blumstein,
director of the National Consortium on Research Violence at Carnegie
Mellon University. "But I'm not sure that the best response is to ship
them out the door and onto the street, where they might plan to do even
more harm."

Whatever their effectiveness at stopping violence, some of these
measures-arming school guards with shotguns, for example, as Los
Angeles did-smack of overkill. Stockton-like shootings are incredibly
rare. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control, less than
one percent of homicides and suicides among children occur on school
grounds. Newspapers and television reporters often cite statistics from
the National School Safety Center to support the notion that shootings
"can happen anywhere." But the numbers from the federally funded
center-it reports an average of 35 "school-associated violent deaths"
per year since 1992-are padded by an assortment of teenage suicides and
gang-related killings. The center's 53-death tally in 1993-the highest
in its seven years of tracking violence-even includes a Little League
coach hit by a stray bullet, a Las Vegas security guard who committed
suicide on a school athletic field, and a 16-year-old student shot on
the subway while on the way home from school.

There's no doubt that the '90s push for school safety has saved
lives. But Purdy, Kinkel, Harris, Klebold, and the others serve as a
useful reminder that schools will never be able to keep all the world's
insanity at bay. And at some point, a school bristling with armed
guards, metal detectors, and hidden cameras ceases to be a school.

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